Troy was on fire. After ten years of war, the Greeks had managed to enter the city with a ruse. Now they were chasing everyone. The Trojan warrior Aeneas hastened to the house of his father, Anchises. He begged him to flee the city, but the old man wouldn’t hear of it. “You, who still have the fresh blood of youth in your veins and are still in the prime of your life, you must flee. If the dwellers of heaven had wanted to keep me alive, they would have saved this place.”
Aeneas protested. What kind of son was he if he left his father to die? “How can you get such a great misdeed over your lips?” He threw Anchises over his shoulder and fled the city. Finally, after many wanderings, Aeneas ended up in Italy, where, so the myth goes, he became the progenitor of the Roman people.
In what language would this conversation between father and son have been conducted? We know the dramatic scene from the epic Aeneid by the Roman author Virgil. He wrote in Latin in the first century BC, but that was of course not the language spoken in Troy. The Aeneid and also the illias There are no reports of Homer, but antiquarians agree that Troy actually existed and was destroyed in a war around 1180 BC. At that time, a ‘Trojan’ people really lived on the northwest coast of Turkey, with their own language.
Alwin Kloekhorst, senior lecturer at the Center for Linguistics at Leiden University, thinks he has discovered which language that was. He recently published his findings in the article Luwians, Lydians, Etruscans, and Troy. The Linguistic Landscape of Northwestern Anatolia in the Pre-Classical Period.
For the general public
Kloekhorst specializes in the languages that were spoken in Anatolia, present-day Turkey, before the beginning of our era. Ten years ago the Allard Pierson Museum asked him to write a piece for an exhibition about Troy. “In that text I speculated about the language spoken in Troy, but that was for the general public. Colleagues asked me to further elaborate this theory scientifically. That is what I have done with this article.”
There are very few Bronze Age (1950-1180 BC) sources in this western part of Anatolia, says Kloekhorst. “We know that Troy really existed from clay tablets found in Hattusa, the capital of the Hittites, a people who lived between 1700 and 1200 BC. ruled a great empire in the heart of Anatolia. The tablets mention Wiluša, a kingdom that coincides in territory with Troas, the country of which Troy was the capital. One of the kings there was called Alakšandu, a name very similar to the Greek AlexsandroV [Alexandros]. That does not prove that Greek was the official language here, but that there may have been migration of people from the Greek-speaking world.”
Another language that may have been spoken in Wiluša/Troas is Luwisch, says Kloekhorst. Excavations in Troy have found a seal with an inscription in Luwian hieroglyphs. “But such seals can be found all over the Near East, so it is not surprising that one was also found in Troy. That does not mean that they spoke Luwisch there.”
In short, there is no convincing evidence about the language of Troy from the Bronze Age – the period when Troy fought against a Greek invasion force, which may or may not be mythical warriors. Therefore, Kloekhorst went in search of sources from the Iron Age and the subsequent Classic period of Greek history (1200-500 and 500-300 BC).
hard to endure
It was not only Wiluša that had a hard time around 1200, because during this time the so-called Bronze Age Collapse Place. All around the Mediterranean, empires collapsed and migrants from Western and Northern Europe invaded. Likewise in Anatolia. Languages like Phrygian and Lydian arose there, which were spoken north and east of Wiluša. On the island of Lemnos, 70 kilometers off the coast of Troas, people spoke Lemnisch. “That is a very special language,” says Kloekhorst. “Unlike all other Anatolian languages, Lemnian is not Indo-European. However, linguistic analysis shows that this language does have a family outside Anatolia, namely in Italy. These are Etruscan, in the area above Rome, and Raetic, which was spoken in the Alps. So these languages must have had a common ancestor – a language that was spoken somewhere before the Bronze Age Collapse.”
The people who spoke Etruscan and Lemnian were sometimes called Tyrsenoi (Tyrrhenians) by classical Greek authors. They were always spoken of in the past tense, as if they were a disappearing population. Kloekhorst: “At the beginning of this century, Leiden professor of Indo-European Robert Beekes collected all references to the Tyrsenoi. If you place it on a map of the area around the northern Aegean Sea, a region is created with the Wiluša/Troas Empire and the city of Troy at its heart. My conclusion is therefore: in Troy a language was spoken which I call Proto-Tyrrens, the language from which Lemnian and Etruscan later evolved.”
And so linguistics fits nicely into the story of Aeneas, a man who fled northwestern Anatolia and ended up in Italy. “You come across the figure of Aeneas in Etruria as early as the seventh century BC. against vases”, says Kloekhorst. As far as I am concerned, that made it unlikely that he only became popular after the distribution of Homer’s illias in the eighth century. In addition, he was a minor character in that poem, so why would the Romans have chosen him as ancestor? No, I think in the Aeneid you can hear the echoes of a flight from Wiluša, of people who spoke Proto-Tyrrene and found a new home in Italy.”